Tuesday, May 23, 2006

Dutch marketing bloggers professionalise

Over the weekend the Dutch collective marketing blog Marketingfacts signed up its 50 blogger. In the background a professionalisation is taking place as the collective blog will be more tightly organised editorially and an ad-network is being set up.

The Marketingfacts blog has won in influence over the last year. A news item on a working day reaches within 24 hours easily 10.000 viewers with some 300 click throughs. By bringing experts together from metrics to event marketing, from content to search engine marketing specialists, the collective blog can work systematically on the editorial organisation and advertisement network.

Marco Derksen, the moving spirit behind the blog, sees now editorial opportunities. So far the contributor just forwarded posting whenever a subject came up. Irregularly some longer articles were published. But with a group of 50 contributors more editorial value can be organised. Besides the daily news every day longer articles can published like an analysis of the past period or a specific development. It is the first sign of the professionalisation of a collective blog.

But there is also a second development for this blog: the launch of a advertisement network for blogs, called Blogads.nl. Together with Jeroen Bertrams, Marco Derksen has set up the Dutch counterpart to Blogads.com. The network is the result of some frustration as no advertisement party has wanted to pick up this segment of the market. Blogads will focus on two pactivities: a completely computerised advertisement network on CPM base as an alternative to Google Adsense; the organisation of weblog campaigns like Bloggers in Amsterdam or International bloggers.

It is not only Marketingfacts, which is professionalizing. It was clear at Blogonomics 2006, that the blogging Dutch are about to upgrade. On June 1, 2006 a meeting will be held for bloggers focussing on blog metrics. I am eager to attend that meeting as I want to be able to check the traffic by unique visitors, by country, by length and by web browser; I could not care less about what operating system they use. I have tried to install a counter, but did not succeed. So I look forward to a short course Metrics for Dummies.

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About Me

Jak Boumans (1945) is principal consultant with Electronic Media Reporting, a private consultancy specialised in content strategy, based in Almere (The Netherlands). In 1970 he started in the publishing industry with companies like VNU and Kluwer, particularly in general encyclopaedias. From 1980 he got involved in electronic publishing, running a videotex studio. In 1984 he launched a daily online newsletter for the computer industry from London. In 1987 he was part of the production team that produced the first Dutch subscription CD-ROM for Kluwer for lawyers.
In 1990 he started the private company Electronic Media Reporting, a consultancy specialised in content. He worked for international organisation ( European Commission, OESO), Dutch ministries, national organisations and companies.
He is secretary-general of the European Academy of Digital Media (EADiM) and board member of the multimedia competition World Summit Award (WSA).
He has written for national and international magazines. He was contributor, editor and editor-in-chief of Telecombrief (1981-2004). He wrote, contributed to and co-edited books. His last book in Dutch was on Pre-internet in de polder (1967-1997).